Anant Agarwal runs EdX.org, the Harvard-MIT open-education site, and he’s here to talk MOOCs, those “massively open online courses” that have generated both excitement and skepticism throughout the chattering world of the digital classes.

Agarwal shows a picture of a lecture hall in MIT from 50 years ago. Then one of the scene from today. What has changed? Not much, it seems. “The seats are in color?” he offers. “Whoopdie do.”

Classroom education hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years. EdX and similar programs are an attempt to be the change the education field needs to see, an attempt to disrupt a calcified industry that Agarwal says needs no less than to be shattered and rebuilt from the ground up. He wants to share some insights gleaned since the launch of EdX, when 155,000 students from 162 countries signed up for an MIT course on circuits and electronics. That’s more…